Working on a project at the moment that has me thinking about title tags...

It's a competitive sector, and a previous SEO company did some work on the old site, and the titles are all stuffed with keywords.

This is not something I am a fan of, I prefer natural looking titles which scan well for humans in SERPS, with keywords used as naturally as possible.

BUT - in many competitive sectors you see page after page of keyword stuffed titles, and the site I'm working on gets quite good results, despite having very little other than the titles going for it interms of the terms it's performing for...

SO... what do people think?

Keyword stuffed SEO titles:

• Are they good practise?
• Do they perform?
• Will Google eventually penalise with keyword stuffed titles?
• How do keyword titles perform against more humanly readable titles?
• Do you use them?

Any other views?

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Frank Prendergast
for web design cork

Google displays 64 characters of a page title while Yahoo displays 75. Now, I'm not sure if the bots read Only the first x characters or if they display the portion of the page title that is more relevant, hopefully someone can confirm this.

But I would always go with the most legible and human friendly page titles and then ensure there is a good keyword density contained with the main copy.

As cormac said
Getting a high rank for your keywords is only half the battle , enticing searchers to click your link above the other nine in my mind is just as important.

it can degrade the look of the site a bit, cant it ? - or at least it has to me - when i happen to notice a title tag stuffed with keywords i start to think "free screensavers" "smilies" and am turned off just a little bit - just my 2c

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Yes, I'm in total agreement with both of you, or certainly it has always been my approach to date.

However, with certain sectors leaning obviously toward the other approach I wondered...

I would love to see how a more humanly scannable title would fare right in the middle of loads of keyword stuffed ones.

If it's possible to test I might just do so

Interesting article on titles.
How to Use Title Tags Effectively for SEO | New Orleans Internet Marketing

That's a good enough article alright, but it's pretty much what I, and it would appear others here *think/feel*.

But I wonder where the hard facts lie.

The project that I'm working on now (sorry I can't be more specific right now, but it would put me in an awkward position) pretty much ignores all that advice and performs well for what I would consider fairly/very competitive terms.

And it would seem their competitors do too.

I'll certainly be interested to see when the updated project goes live what I can glean from the results.

Hey Frank

Only issue is that human-friendly titles probably wont ever be seen unless you're in the top 5.

Google will display up to 68, or in some cases 70 characters BTW. I have a plugin that mimics the SERP display for any page you're on.

It's a difficult one, but I tend to think that in the long run Google wants to do what's best for humans, so while human friendly titles may actually hurt in the short run, you have to imagine that as Google gets cleverer they will favour what's good for users over what's good for bots more and more...

Good news is that you can probably test this out to see how it might affect your rankings, and if you hold as much else constant while you test, revert back if it has a negative impact.

Rgds
Richard

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RedCardinal.ie Search Engine Optimisation & Online Marketing
I offer Web Strategy Consulting and SEO Services.
My sister's handmade canape company - Catering Company Dublin
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Richard, is that a Firefox plugin?
With regards to the characters, are the first x characters shown or are the characters which are most relevant to the search displayed? I tried testing for this but I found it difficult to find any solid answers via the SERPS.

Thanks Richard,

I think this is probably the most realistic assesment! Unfortunately time contraints prevent proper testing of the titles on the existing site before other significant changes are made, but what I hope to do it go live with new site & old titles and then run a test on some new titles once the new site settles.

WRT human scannable titles, and also what you say about the top 5, I wonder if people just click the top 5 anyway - ie if your title said 'Queejibo Queejibo' instead of 'Relevant Keyword', and managed to stay inthe top 5 , would CTR suffer...

Cheers,
Frank